


Eat Your Own Cooking

by vyatka



Category: Orphan Black
Genre: Anger, Postpartum Depression, alison and sarah are also there but not enough to actually tag them, back at it again with depressed helena, bad kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-07-10 22:46:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15959180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: The truth is that she feels like she is sanding a rock, and the rock is herself, and she cannot bear watching herself turn to dust.





	Eat Your Own Cooking

**Author's Note:**

> i don't sleep i only think about helena's sadness

Helena smiles, showing all her teeth. She presses her lips together. Then she smiles again, bigger and wider. She has a patch of flaky dry skin at the corner of her mouth that hurts when she opens it too wide. 

Her reflection doesn't convince her even a little. 

When Helena was small, she taught herself to stand on one leg like a ballet dancer. She wobbled, kept putting her foot down. This is like that, she thinks. She learned to stand on one foot, and she will learn to smile when she wants to cry. 

She comes out of the bathroom, tongue in her cheek. Alison and her new hair are already sitting neatly on the floor, cooing at Baby Arthur. 

"You will be well?" Helena asks her. 

"Oh, yes. We have everything we need." Alison tickles the baby's feet and he spits, giggling. Helena smiles at him - a real smile, not a one-legged smile - and makes for the door. It looks like freedom, the door. Sweet freedom. She tries not to walk too quickly. She may be able to convince Sarah that she is alright and fine and happy thank you, but Alison is harder to trick. Alison has already found her crying. Helena said "hormones", a word that seems to be a police badge here in this place of women, but she cannot hide it forever. 

She imagines talking about it with Sarah. Oh, no. If she talked about it with Sarah, she would cry, and Sarah would hate it and pretend not to hate it and Helena would know. 

If she said the truth, they would hate her. All of them. Alison most of all, who Helena knows from Donnie wanted to birth babies badly, before Oscar and little Gemma. Ungrateful. That is what they would call her. Ungrateful. And rude. And awful, and evil. 

The truth. 

That, if Helena could choose again, she is not sure she would have her babies. 

 ***

Gyms, in Helena's frank opinion, have no worth. She's tried them. They were stupid. And boring. And men looked at her, which is one of the most unpleasant things that can happen. Though Helena's horizons of family have broadened to include Art and Felix and Donnie, nothing will ever convince her that men as a group are anything more than nuisances at best. 

So she goes to the park instead, climbs a bench, crosses her arms over her chest, and curls slowly backward until she is upside down. 

Helena blows a bee out of her face and curls back up, without haste. 

"And again," she murmurs. 

Harden up, belly. 

Helena doesn't care about how it looks. Before recently, she never cared about how anything looked at all. It's not the look of her babyless belly that she resents. 

It's the softness to the touch. 

At first, she marveled over it. Soft and warm. When the twins were inside of her, she became soft and round and warm, in her face and legs and breasts as well as in her stomach. And when she got to a mirror, after they were born, it looked so strange that she giggled - wobbly flesh where there was once nothing but hard muscle. It's normal, Sarah assured her, and lifted her shirt to show the squiggly white lines where Kira had stretched her belly and it had shrunk back. "You'll lose it fast enough." 

Helena only wants her strength back. 

Not her violence, just. 

But what if she  _needs_ her violence? What if someone tries to hurt the babies, and Helena cannot stop them because she has forgotten her violence? She has dreams about that, sometimes. Gray dreams about Tomas, or worse, about Henrik, even though she killed him, he is dead. He is dead. And if he comes back from the dead, she will kill him again. And the other man, the horrible one who Sarah killed, and terrible rapist Rudy. 

Why are men so terrible? She wants to know. Why is it that all they do is hurt? 

Not that she has any room to cast stones, she reminds herself. 

The truth is that she feels like she is sanding a rock, and the rock is herself, and she cannot bear watching herself turn to dust. Sand for the babies to eat. 

She giggles. 

The rivers in this park are manmade streams, and occasionally they have crawfish in them. Mostly they have litter. Helena grumbles, dropping to her knees, and fishes a soda can out from some rocks. 

And people call  _her_ dirty. 

If her children litter, she will strike them with a wooden spoon, she vows. She won't. It just feels righteous to make the vow. 

She crab-scoots a step to get a slimy wrapper half-buried in the sand. Partially, she is just delaying going home. 

"Hey, can I help - " 

She freezes. "No," she informs the voice. "Go away." 

He approaches her across the rocks. His footsteps crunch. Helena can tell, without looking up, that he is a short man. That he moves with confidence, flexible and full of grace. She fills her hand with silt, plants her feet, and lets out a breath, waiting. 

_Helena,_ Alison says sternly, in Helena's mind. 

_Alison,_ Helena says back, just as sternly, also in Helena's mind. 

"Ya sure?" the man says, and he is friendly, so he puts a hand on her shoulder. 

Helena locks her ankles and shoots into a standing position. 

Her body is a bullet. The back of her head cracks against his jaw, and her shoulders collide with his chest hard enough to throw him back. Her hand is full of rocks and wet sand, and she is wheeling to strike him in his slack hand with it, and she does. She is so angry. She has no reason to be, and yet she is. Her body hums with an anger too tender to touch, like the edges of a bullet wound. 

She thinks Sarah would be ashamed. 

It is then that she notices, belatedly, that the short friendly man is someone she knows. The sand still in her fist drops to the bank. 

"Jesse Towing," she gasps and accuses at the same time. 

Breakable boy. Helena damaged him very much, and all she did was stand up quickly and hit him with some pebbles. Blood drips down his chin. Dirt mats his sandy - in color, although now also in texture - hair. He struggles for breath. 

" _Jesse,_ " she repeats. It's nothing to grasp his arm and haul him to his feet. "I am sorry, Jesse. So sorry." Her heart pounds in her ears. 

He drags in a breath. 

"You will be alright." She rubs between his shoulders. "We'll go to my сестра's house, yes? I can fix you, and we can talk." Her heart feels like it is going to punch through her ribs. "Come with." 

 ***

When Helena and Jesse Towing (and Helena's arm is half-holding him up) limp together through the door like a three-legged beast, Sarah is there, little Donnie on her hip, yelling to Alison, who is in the kitchen. 

"Oh, Jesus Christ," says Sarah. "What happened? You two alright?" 

Helena nods. "He scared me." 

"My bad," says Jesse. 

"Told Alison it wouldn't be a good surprise. Too jumpy these days, meathead." 

Ah. So Sarah has noticed. 

With the hand not balancing a baby, Sarah waves. "Come on, get yourself cleaned up. Helena, help him." She turns just in time to intercept Alison, who claps her palm to her mouth and lowers it only to say "Helena!" 

"Sorry," Helena calls again, and tows Jesse Towing to the bathroom where she practiced her smiles, to wash off his blood with a warm cloth and determine if he has any teeth missing. (He doesn't.) She fusses over him more than is necessary, clucking and holding his face in her two hands, the way she wished someone would when she was still young and gentle. 

He is alright. His mouth will be sore tomorrow, Helena predicts. 

"How did you find me," she asks. 

She is still wearing her park clothes, which are Alison's dancing clothes and Cop Beth's gym hoodie, and the sweat, drying cold, makes her shiver. Awaiting his answer, she zips the hoodie up. 

"Your sister called me. Not the scary one, the, uh - the one with the purple in her hair." 

"Ah." Helena puts her hands in her pockets. They don't seem to know what to do with themselves. "Because you are my boyfriend." 

His smile has a split lip. "She said to surprise you. Guess she didn't bet on you bustin' my mouth open." 

Oh, towing boy. Helena looks at him the way she used to look at finished kills, back when she was a killing thing. He is not so good as she remembered. It is not his fault. It has nothing at all to do with him. It is just that, now that he is here, in front of her, the top of his lip swollen and his smile crooked in a way that should tug at the strings of her heart but somehow doesn't, she realizes that she might have liked the idea of him more than she truly likes him. Like she liked the idea of a wedding, before she had one. And the idea of babies. 

Helena steps close to him. 

She tilts her head and makes herself kiss him. 

She doesn't think of it as making herself. She does have to push herself into it, a little, and be the unkind hand at the small of her own back. She hits his swollen limp and he winces - 

-  _sorry -_

\- and he, ever gentle, puts his hands on her waist. Under her ribs. He is so soft and kind. Is that why she thought she loved him? Maybe anything feels like love to Helena. Sarah's hate used to feel like love to her. 

The idea of a kiss is to keep moving your mouth, so she does. She closes her eyes. 

_Slobbery,_ she thinks. 

He doesn't do anything to hurt her. He doesn't do much of anything. He lets her kiss him. 

Helena stops. She pulls the sleeves of Beth the Cop's gym hoodie over her hands. "I am sorry," she says again. 

Jesse Towing smiles that crooked, pretty smile. 

She leads him out of the bathroom. 

Alison hurls herself into apology. Sarah is all grins and jokes, and hands the baby to Helena - he needs to eat - and claps Jesse on the back. 

Helena feels only pity. 

In the garage, she watches the baby find her nipple. (A strangle thing that he has trouble, they're so large and dark.) 

She has thought she loved so many things. Maybe she doesn't really know what it is. Maybe she has been grasping at things to love for her whole life. 

"Sad," she tells her baby, and stays in the garage until sweet, lovely Jesse Towing is gone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Women having bad kisses with men is a recurring theme in my work. What am I trying to work through. We may never know.
> 
> Title is from episode 5 of _Kingdom_ for the sole reason that I am watching that show right now. 
> 
> If you enjoyed this, please kudos/comment! 
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


End file.
